Has President Obama already made black Americans ‘more intelligent’?
I am spending the day at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Imaging Neuroscience. The all day seminar will explore what implications the insights of neuroscience and the newly emerging discipline of neuro-economics will have for policy. (By the way, there was a discussion of neuro-economics on the Today Programme this morning.)
Running throughout the day will be discussion of a key spectrum for understanding what shapes human decision making; this can be expressed as the distinction between the sub-conscious adaptation and conscious choice or between ‘pull’ factors (that shape our behaviour though environmental context and sand social norms) and ‘push factors’ (attempts explicitly to persuade people to behave in particular ways).
There have been over several decades many attempts to push up the educational performance of black Americans, but Jonah Lehrer (coming soon to the RSA) reports this week that the pull factor of President Obama’s election seems to have had a remarkable effect. Read his fascinating post here.
A Mekon’s response
- Matthew Taylor
I don’t know whether to be flattered or insulted – my old friend, John Prescott, has launched an attack on me on his website which has been picked up in several other places.
JP describes me as a ‘pointy head’, a policy wonk’ and ‘the type of person I would describe as a Mekon’. I am flattered by the suggestion that I am an intellectual; I have never really got over someone introducing me as ‘Matthew Taylor – he runs a think tank, but is more tank than think’.
Unfortunately, JP, in attacking me, is misleading his readers. He says that I said that Labour should ‘host the white flag’ and ‘give up’. In fact, what I advocated in my blog was what I saw as Labour’s best chance of staying electorally competitive – to focus on the economic crisis and try to put party politics on the back burner until there is some good news.
Maybe John’s definition of a Mekon is someone who tries to understand an argument before attacking it. On this basis many more of us would qualify as being ‘pointy headed intellectuals’.
All of which reminds me of the old Soviet joke:
A: One who can read, one who can write and one to keep an eye on the two dangerous intellectuals!
A truly radical approach to civil service reform
I spent an hour or so yesterday at the think tank Reform discussing a draft paper on civil service reform. The paper is a perfectly decent canter over the usual terrain. The argument is that the civil service is not fit for purpose, something that has been exposed by various policy and commissioning disasters but also by the dissatisfaction of ministers I and the many flaws exposed by the Cabinet Office capability reviews.
The argument is that incremental change has not worked. From this, reports tend to move to a set of options which focus on the interface between ministers and senior civil servants.
This is fine as far as it goes, and I certainly agree that the biggest challenges for the service lie in the relationship between the politicians and the officials. My problem with the approach is that it takes as given the demands made on departments by ministers.
If we were looking at the performance of any other large organisation it would be appropriate to ask whether it is sensible to expect the organisation to be able to do well all the things asked of it. This is why the outcome of many reviews of private and third sector organisations is that they should hive off functions or try to do less better. But this isn’t simply a matter of the civil service devolving more to localities or setting up more arm’s length agencies.
For departments to function effectively there needs to be a better way of managing and regulating the demands made on them. The question should not simply be ‘has the department delivered what it was supposed to’ but also ‘was it ever reasonable to expect the department to deliver what was asked of it?’
As well as questioning the process by which departmental workloads are determined, and redefined, by politicians – often without notice or any assessment of capacity or effect on existing work programmes - we also need to recognise that the ‘civil’ duties of the civil service are not merely about responding to the demands poured into them from their ministerial masters. The question needs to be how departments manage inputs, not just top down, but also from the wider policy community and society itself.
The idea that Whitehall can often be out of touch with ‘the front line’ of policy delivery is hardly new. It is most often addressed through the collection of detailed data. But departmental decision makers need to have the scope to gain deeper insights into the experiences of the people delivering its policies and on their receiving end. And senior officials also have a vital ‘civil’ role in managing the policy community, not simply responding to lobbying from vested interests or receiving the ideas of academics and think tanks but working with the community so that it engages constructively and creatively with the Government’s objectives.
A truly radical approach to civil service reform would recognise that the civil and democratic responsibilities of senior public officials lie not simply in the service of their political masters but in being accountable and connected to policy communities and wider society. From this starting point, any fundamental inquiry into how the civil service can possibly work better for us all must include questioning the fitness for purpose of the cultures, methods and demands of the political system of Government.
Can 2012 be an inclusive Olympics – or will they be scuppered by political inertia and squabbling?
Can 2012 be an inclusive Olympics, or will political inertia and squabbling mean we renege on the pledge we made when we won the bid?
Last October, I described my dismay after attending a meeting about the Olympics organised by Editorial Intelligence. The panel of Olympic organisers and experts did nothing to refute my allegation that the goal of the Olympics acting as a catalyst for greater sporting participation in London had been all but abandoned. In fact, as further statistics have since revealed, participation levels in most parts of London (including the Olympic boroughs) are neither rising nor catching up with the rest of the country.
But it’s not the RSA way to walk away from a problem if we think we can make a difference. The last two months have been busy. Drawing on a combination of my own speaker and media fees and a kind donation from the London Region of the RSA, we have funded a young researcher, Ashish Prashar, to develop an outline action plan for a three year campaign to deliver mass sporting participation in the capital ahead of 2012.
Ashish has had great support from the wide range of organisations committed to participation and we have developed four main ideas:
• A mass coaching scheme in which employers give staff time off and/or help pay the fees for their staff to do a Level One coaching qualification. We believe it is possible for another 50,000 people to be trained as coaches between now and 2012. That’s a real human legacy.
• A London-wide Timebanking scheme in which people who volunteer (particularly in ways which help participation) get credits for access to sporting facilities and events.
• A new scheme and clearing house to identify and match up with demand sporting facilities and resources which could be made available free or subsidised. Key partners would be private gyms, independent and state schools, local authorities and the Royal Parks.
• A new high profile website and portal to act as the single contact point for people wanting to get involved or help others get involved .
Yesterday we hosted a meeting to discuss these ideas with a wide range of people who could play a part in a London participation campaign. The good news was that, although some of the people there could have felt the idea trod on their toes and others might have worried about the demands that could be made on them, there was unanimous support for the idea of an independent umbrella campaign (working title ‘Let the Games Begin’).
We have set ourselves two weeks to make this into a concrete proposal which we will then send to the various Olympic bodies and in particular the Mayor’s Office, which is currently preparing its own sports strategy.
To do all the preparation necessary to be able to launch the campaign in July this year (exactly three years before the games) is a huge task and the RSA can do very little more without backing (indeed we are more than happy to hand the idea over to whoever is best able to deliver it). But it can be done. The real barriers now are political.
The more closely I look at the politics of the Olympics, the more dispirited I become. But if this idea is killed off – not because it isn’t needed or couldn’t work – but because the various agencies put their self importance or petty organisational rivalry ahead of what London needs I’ll make sure everyone knows about it!
Reporting back on the Teachers’ TV debate
I said I would report back on the Teachers’ TV debate last night. The gig was worth it even if only to see the magnificent Capital City Academy building and facilities in Willesden. Call me a liberal old softie, but I find it inspiring to see wonderful facilities like this serving a diverse working class community.
Following my piece in the Indie yesterday, which suggested Labour was unlikely to recover using traditional political means, I fear I will have been disowned by even the tiny group of friends I had left in the People’s Party. But by way of balance I should say that I am a firm believer that Labour’s combination of reform and investment has delivered real and lasting progress in public services.
Of course, there have been disasters, like the NHS IT system, but when the number of people waiting over 6 months for NHS treatment has fallen from several hundred thousand to zero, when survival rates from cancer and other major killers are rising impressively, when more children than ever before are leaving school with a reasonable level of qualification, when the number of abjectly failings schools has been reduced to a small fraction (each of which is having its problems aggressively addressed); then, in the light of the financial crisis, it is difficult not to conclude that the benefits of state action are proving more worthwhile than those of the free market. (And, more anecdotally, let me loudly proclaim on the basis of extensive personal research it is now much better to try to deal with a public sector than a private sector call centre!)
And so to the debate itself. Despite the skilled chairing of Krishnan Guru-Murthy and the learned contributions of three out of four of the other panellists, it was a night of false dichotomies: subject versus competence, knowledge versus skill, relevance versus insight. There was even someone in the audience from a campaign arguing that greater use of computers in schools would kill the book – this despite sales evidence showing the reverse, and the fact that the works being replaced by on-line information are largely text books and thus not likely to have appeared in the canon of world classics.
Another highpoint was the woman from the Campaign for Real Education attacking the Rose Review of the primary curriculum, but apparently doing so without being distracted by actually reading let alone understanding the review. Clearly another victim of trendy teaching methods!
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